Movie-Rumors understands that Woody Allen’s involvement in the forthcoming Expendables 3 is part of two-picture deal which will see the veteran actor squaring up against Sylvester Stallone as the adversary in Rocky 7.

Allen seemed slightly disoriented when we caught up with him outside the Carlyle Hotel in New York. “I really don’t know what I’m doing. Am I? I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

Asked how he’s planning to top the fight scenes in Rocky Balboa, let alone the epic Rocky 4, Stallone told interviewers: “I come out and I smash him.”

Bill Riggs of Indiana, who has been dating his real life girlfriend for the past eighteen months, has found himself looking forward to the movie The Hobbit.

“I couldn’t believe it. I definitely have a girlfriend. Her name’s Sarah. But last week I just started thinking that I’d quite like to see that Hobbit movie.”

Surprisingly, it’s not the first time a man with a girlfriend has started looking forward to The Hobbit. Harry O’Leary of Dublin, Ireland told friends while drunk that he’d quite like to see The Hobbit. However, in the same evening he also announced that he was ThePope, and that he was trying to get pregnant.

Actress Kate Winslet was forced to shave to shoot key evening scenes for hit 1997 film Titanic – because the moonlight kept striking her stubble and ruining the shot.

Winslet was just 20 years old when she stepped into the role of Rose opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in director James Cameron’s blockbuster hit.

The actress recalls she was so cold shooting one particular sequence, in which she jumps from the doomed luxury liner, her facial hair stood on end and caused complications for Cameron.

She tells People magazine, “The light was catching all the little hairs on my chin and Jim (Cameron) was like, ‘We’re going to have to shave your face.’ So we stop filming and the make-up artist has a Bic razor and some Gillette shaving foam. It was hilarious.”

But Winslet reveals she wasn’t the only one affected by the chilly conditions: “Leo was just useless. He was like, ‘I don’t want to be cold anymore.’ I did the looking after. He was a 21-year-old baby.”

After months of speculation, it has been revealed why Transformers actor Shia Saide LaBeouf and Captain America special effects guru Stephen Onions, have pulled out of future installments of their respective franchises.

Tokyo-based anime giant Studio Ghibli yesterday confirmed that it had given the go-ahead for an animated Japanese remake of iconic 1996 Brit-flickTrainspotting.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that legendary director Hayao Miyazaki will helm the re-imagining of Danny Boyle’sOscar-nominated feature, set to be transplanted from Edinburgh to Miyazaki’s doorstep in Tokyo. Movie-Rumors has seen a sneak preview of an early draft of the Japanese script, which will follow the exploits of several drug-addled salarymen doubled up on a train platform who hatch a lucrative criminal plot, only to find themselves transported to a fantastical world of spirits and talking animals uniting against impending ecological disaster.

**** the ****ing ******* **** and *******, Spud!

Studio Ghibli is renowned for a signature combination of sumptuous hand-drawn animation, a blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, and subtle philosophical musings on themes such as the innocence of childhood, the disconnect between modern human life and nature, and large cuddly toys that can move and walk by themselves. Ghibli’s best known films include 2001 Academy Award winner Spirited Away and 1988 feature My Neighbour Totoro (above), the eponymous star of which is the studio’s logo.

Yet in recent months Miyazaki has reportedly grown frustrated with the Ghibli canon and in December told a Japanese film magazine that he wanted to make something ‘less life-affirming, more nihilistic – perhaps something a bit Clockwork Orangey, or maybe just something that is really, really shit.’ The studio swiftly scotched reports in February that Miyazaki was working on an an ultra-violent tale of London’s East End criminal underworld – rumored to feature Danny Dyer – but was ambiguous about the director’s future trajectory. It had remained largely silent until the Trainspotting announcement.

The Twitterverse is all of a flutter right now, vibrant with speculation that a 3D version of Warner Brothers‘ 1942 classic Casablanca is in the works.

Excited micro-bloggers yesterday briefly saw the Humphrey Bogart melodrama top trending charts after uncovering a resume apprently posted online by a former editor with the Burbank studio. Listed among their experience was a reference to work on an ‘Unannounced 3D re-release of classic romantic wartime propaganda epic set in primary Moroccan port city’, leading to frenzied detective work across the movie industry blogosphere. Three hours after the leak was first spotted, the community appeared to have cracked the riddle, with Twitter user theeinsteininstitute exclaiming, ‘omg just got it!!! @movieFBIagent its not 3D how to recognise a jap spy!!! its 3d Casablanca!!! no freakin way – so awesome!!!’

The artists’ resume has since been taken down from a leading filmmaking job site.

If you don’t experience extended depth of field with Dolby Digital surround sound you’ll regret it; maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Hopford Securities industry analyst Bernard Sandles claimed any re-release was likely to coincide with the holiday season and would be ‘the next logical step’ for Warner Brothers. ‘That scene where the plane takes off and they are walking off into the desert, that will work in 3D. It’ll really increase the audience’s sense of the long road to victory yet to be travelled in 1942.’

Last year Warner was forced into denying it was considering a remake of the iconic film, after rumors that Leonard Nimoy and 80s legend Kelly McGillis had been cast in the Bogart and Bergman roles wiped more than $6 billion off parent company TimeWarner’s share value.

In a rare, candid interview with Ellen this week, the Men in Black franchise confessed that it often feels lonely and unloved.

“People use me once, just because I’m there, and then never see me again,” the tearful franchise explained. “I’ve never known what it’s like to be loved. Even my creators don’t seem to care. It’s like they had me just so they could claim benefits.”

The franchise opened up about a long line of psychological and emotional troubles: “I had an identity crisis from the start. Was I Ghostbusters, or was I Blues Brothers? And then I had a crisis of faith. There were times when I even doubted the existence of Dan Aykroyd.”

The franchise told the uninterested chat-show host that it would either join a convent, or turn to crack and do a fourth movie.

Steven Spielberg has revealed that his next film will likely involve neither the perspective of a small child, nor any moments of slapstick comic relief involving objects running away from hapless pursuers just as they appear ready to catch them, sparking concern for the future viability of the universe at a leading European scientific research institute.

Lincoln, a biopic of the 16th President of the United States starring Daniel Day Lewis, was said by insiders to be “largely adult-focused” and “pretty serious” in its treatment of the American Civil War, despite the copious opportunities presented by the subject matter for children to play innocently among wartime ruins while earnestly questioning why men do such terrible things to other men. The $50 million feature, currently in post-production after shooting in Illinois, was also said to have “totally rejected” the potential to exploit bearded, banjo-playing Confederate soldiers whose trousers fall during combat.

CERN, the Swiss-based European nuclear research institute, last night informed alarmed science ministries across its twenty member states that Spielberg’s decision contained the “very real possibility” of disrupting or even completely destroying the space-time continuum and thus all known space, matter and time in the universe. One expert told Movie-Rumors that, combined with CERN’s own sub-atomic particle research at its Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border, Lincoln had dramatically increased the possibility of imminent apocalypse. “The chances of all creation being annihilated at the speed of light in a gigantic ball of fire before Lincoln releases are now about one in four”, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Or it could just get very, very cold. The truth is we just don’t know.”

Spielberg, the Academy Award-winning director and producer of films such as Jaws and Schindler’s List, was reported in US media as having welcomed the increased risk associated with such a radical artistic vision, claiming that cinema “needs to be more challenging to audiences and the fundamental forces governing the cosmos.” Industry moguls have recently appeared to concur, giving green lights to Spielberg projects Jurassic Park IVand the fifth Indiana Jones feature, as well as funding three Transformers films, co-produced with Yale philosophy professor Michael Bay.

European science ministers were today expected to issue a joint statement condemning the move, while seeking urgent discussions with their US counterparts. Although First Amendment law expressly prevents Washington from censoring American creative industries, it was thought likely that the Obama Administration would seek to exert pressure on production companies Amblin Entertainment and Dreamworks to film additional material in which President Lincoln’s stovepipe hat falls off at an awkward moment, or a small child finds military detritus that could be adapted for use as a simple toy amid the devastation of Gettysburg or Antietam. Even the inclusion of this footage in a deleted scene compendium on the subsequent DVD and Blu Ray release was said by experts to decrease significantly the possibility of impending Armageddon.

This is not the first time that the 65-year-old filmmaker has endangered the existence of everything. In 2005 CERN also warned of Spielberg’s Munich(above), a relentlessly-innocent child-free tale of Israeli special forces’ pursuit of the Black September organisation responsible for the massacre of athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. Despite the discipline shown by Spielberg in maintaining an unflinching eye on the brutality of revenge and its self-perpetuating and self-defeating destructiveness, the universe survived intact. Scientists have since theorised that the elusive nature of the protagonists’ enemies, ever evading their increasingly exasperated grasp, was in fact a metaphor, cleverly smuggled in by Spielberg, for a ping pong ball bouncing down a set of steps, always slightly beyond the desperate clutches of a hapless hero, engendering mirth and momentary relief in all who watch it. Along with the scene in which Israeli agents wear women’s clothing in order to infiltrate an enemy compound, this comic imagery was thus thought to negate Munich’s catastrophic potential and CERN lifted its alert before the release of the two-disc Collector’s Edition in 2006.

Woody Allen is the latest movie veteran to join the cast of the forthcoming Expendables 3, due to start filming later this year.

Allen told sources: “It was important that the next movie I did be shot in the US, and that it be something in the broad action genre.”

Star, Sylvester Stallone, who previously worked with Allen way back in 1971 on Bananas, and then again on 1998’s Antz, posted on his official web-site: “I think it’s great news. I see him maybe taking over from me down the line.”

Getting the cast back together for the new American Pie movie, American Reunion, wasn’t the only nostalgic blast from the past originally intended for the movie. Scenes were filmed, but not used, of a CGI George Washington as high school principle, Mr. Gibbs.

“It was a pleasure working with George,” says star, Jason Biggs. “He really understood the comedy of the piece, as well as the underlying sweetness. I think he appreciated being part of it”

It has yet to be confirmed whether or not the scenes will be restored for the extended Blu Ray version out later this year.

Now that a bunch of people have seen the summer’s first blockbuster, The Avengers Assemble, our eyes wander down the calendar to the summer’s second weekend: May 11. There’s just one wide release that day (likely because studios were still afraid of Marvel’s team up) and it’s Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bohnam Carter and Michelle Pfeiffer, in which Johnny Depp plays another weird little poof.

Since the release of the trailer, fan interest has piqued as the film seems to be a return to the Burton of old, a frightening setting filled with weirdness and humor ala Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, with Depp playing another weird little poof.

Do Burton and Depp succeed in their aim? Entertainment Weekly senior writer Anthony Breznican has seen the movie and tweeted some thoughts over the weekend.

“I’ve seen final cut of Dark Shadows. Tone similar to Burton and Depp’s Sleepy Hollow – lots of humor, but with menacing, atmospheric edge, and a weird little poof.”

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